Breast cancer incidence rates are relatively high in women. Nearly 1 in 8 women in the western world and nearly 1 in 11 women in India will have breast cancer. In the western world, it is the leading cancer in women. In India, for example, it is the second after cervical cancer. Early detection is key to survival as the mortality rates are high for advanced stages. Thermography is an emerging alternative non-invasive and non-contact screening method for breast cancer detection. Thermal imaging captures the infra-red emissivity from the human body in the 7-10 μm wavelength range. Thermal imaging devices are useful for the detection of thermal activity in breast tissue due to a tumor's growth being enabled by causing new blood vessels to grow disproportionately through angiogenesis in the area of the tumor relative to surrounding tissue. This increased biophysical activity beneath the skin surface associated with tumor growth results in a higher metabolic rate which, in turn, results in an elevated temperature in that tissue. This appears as a hotspot in a thermal image containing that tissue. Recently, interest has been rekindled in thermography as a breast cancer screening approach with the improvement in thermal camera resolution and technology. Radiologists and thermographers are increasingly demanding more powerful software interface tools to assist them.
Accordingly, what is needed in this art are increasingly sophisticated software tools which enable medical practitioners to manually or automatically analyze a thermal image of an area of breast tissue for the presence of tumorous tissue.